[thechat] ego-searching / busiest time of my life

[Erik Mattheis]

I'm # 1 for
- pictures of liberated iraqis (and many similar) (and get daily hate 
mail from right wingnuts)
- client's site was once #1 for international banking consultants, but 
they've dropped their website (although I'm sure they could have kept 
is as their hourly fee is $2,500).

In related news, on Tuesday, a client was linked to from metafilter, 
memepool and fark. It was to a page which links to dozens of 
multi-megabyte mp3's. Once in a while, she'll get close to 10,000 page 
views in a day; monday, she got 138,999! And most were to the most 
bandwidth intensive page on her site.

I became aware of it when my account rep called: "Your server is 
putting out 7-9 MB of data per second, and I'm calling to make sure you 
know this is going to cost, well, a lot of money. And if the traffic 
continues, we're going to have to get more bandwidth for the whole 
facility. Which is OK, but I thought you might want to look into it."

I left several messages for my client, "This is your frantic webmaster 
in Minneapolis again ..." ... when I finally got her on the horn, we 
decided to temporarily take the page down until I'd reduced the bitrate 
of the mp3's to 24 kbps .. it's the humor, not the sound quality that's 
important anyway. She has over 400 of them which she rotates. Put it 
back up when I finished reducing the largest files and I'm almost done 
reducing the bitrates of the ones over 1 MB. 
<http://aprilwinchell.com/multimedia/>.

All this on the day I thought my hectic life would cool from a rolling 
boil to a strong simmer. I haven't even checked my telephone messages 
for over a week, but have just called back when I see a number that's 
from a client or someone else important ... have been so busy  I was 
late on rent this month ... I ended up paying it on Monday, plus added 
next month's at the same time as a gesture of apology. My landlord 
called Tuesday, was sure I was going to get a tongue lashing for being 
late, so preemptively apologized, ending with "and I wasn't sure what 
the late fee was, but have since looked at our contract and will get it 
to you as soon as I can."

My landlord replied, "Don't worry about that, that's not while I was 
calling. It's unlike you to be late on rent, so when you were I became 
concerned and thought perhaps you were out of town, as you didn't 
return my messages either." His phone number shows up as the number 
when someone rings the doorbell (a security system connected to my 
phone), so had incorrectly assumed it was just someone who thad stopped 
by when I wasn't home. My landlord continued, "So I went into your 
apartment to see if you were out of town, and it didn't look like you 
were, but noticed your cat's litter box looked like it hadn't been 
cleaned in several days. You should try to be more considerate to your 
cat."

My landlord is very cool, first "good" one I've had since my early 
years of college in the late '80's.

Indeed, the cat box was a mess, I had been out of kittylitter. As of a 
few hours ago, my cat Zoloft has been having a more pleasurable 
bathroom experience.

Actually, this hasn't been the busiest time of my life, just the most 
hectic. The busiest times were either a 48 hour period when I billed 37 
of them on a "rush" project, or last July when I billed around 300 
hours on another rush project.

Just looking for sympathy and publicly flagellating myself for not 
staying on top of my responsibilities as much as I would have liked to!

--
-/erik/

stuff about the invasion, updated daily:
<http://shockingelk.com/>

If the only thing we still have to fear is fear itself, there is more 
than enough to go around.
- R.C. Longworth

More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars.
-Franklin Roosevelt
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